Prominence and Markedness in New Testament Discourse 13 BDF states two functions of the middle, 1) replacement of the active, and 2) in the sense of “to let oneself be,” without explicitly defining the middle48. Porter offers three functions of the middle voice: reflexive, self- involvement, and causality49. After surveying the various options and grammars, he concludes: The Greek voice-form system grammaticalizes the causality system in Greek, that is, the semantic relationship between actions and their causes, and whether and how these causes are linked to the subjects as agents and patients in these processes. The middle voice seems to grammaticalize the feature of internal causality, in which the cause of the action arises from the process, rather than relying upon another agent50. Another helpful definition of the middle comes from Jonathan Pennington, who compares it with the middle voice in other languages containing a middle voice. He concludes: “Thus, far from being merely reflexive (the Direct Middle) or even only expressing self-interest (the Indirect Middle), the Greek middle voice also encompasses a large number of actions and categories involving the subject as the gravitational center of the action”51. For the purposes of determining prominence, the active voice would be the most commonly occurring, and unmarked, voice-form. Consequently, the passive is more marked than the active, and the middle is the most heavily marked voice-form in this system, and would be the most prominent in contexts52. The function of the passive is relatively easy to grasp, since there is a parallel in English: “attention regarding the action is placed upon the grammatical subject (recipient) rather than the agent”53. So while the passive voice-form may convey prominence, it may be that it emphasizes the subject of the verb, rather than the verb itself54. With regard to the middle voice, if it is the most heavily marked voice-form, this brings up the problem of deponency, where certain verbs 48 BDF §316. 49 Stanley E. Porter, “Did Paul Baptize Himself? A Problem of the Greek Voice System,” in Stanley E. Porter and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Dimensions of Baptism: Biblical and Theological Studies (JSNTSup 234; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002) 100. 50 Porter, “Did Paul Baptize Himself,” 109. 51 Jonathan T. Pennington, “Setting Aside ‘Deponency’: Rediscovering the Greek Middle Voice in New Testament Studies,” in Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell (eds.), The Linguist as Pedagogue: Trends in the Teaching and Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament (NTM 11; Sheffield: 2009) 185. 52 Cf. Westfall, “Analysis of Prominence,” 80–81. 53 Porter, Idioms, 64. 54 Westfall, “Analysis of Prominence,” 80–81.